Paris and Helen at the court of Proteus,* and the droll tricks played by a thief at the expense of the simple Ehampsinitus. * Some dragomans identified the Helen of the Homeric legend with the "foreign Aphrodite" who had a temple in the Tyrian quarter at Memphis, and who was really a Semitic divinity. [Illustration: 359.jpg THE STEP PYRAMID SEEN FROM THE GROVE OP PALM TREES TO THE NORTH OF SAQQARAH] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Haussoullier. The excursions made by the Greek traveller in the environs of Memphis were very similar to those taken by modern visitors to Cairo: on the opposite bank of the Nile there was Heliopolis with its temple of Ra, then there were the quarries of Turah, which had been worked from time immemorial, yet never exhausted, and from which the monuments he had been admiring, and the very Pyramids themselves had been taken stone by stone.* * These are "the quarries in the Arabian Mountain," mentioned by Herodotus without indication of the local name. The Sphinx probably lay hidden beneath the sand, and the nearest Pyramids, those at Saqqarah, were held in small esteem by visitors;* they were told as they passed by that the step Pyramid was the most ancient of all, having been erected by Uenephes, one of the kings of the first dynasty, and they asked no further questions. * Herodotus does not mention it, nor does any other writer of the Greek period. Their whole curiosity was reserved for the three giants at Gizeh and their inmates, Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos, and the fair Nitokris with the rosy cheeks. Through all the country round, at Heliopolis, and even in the Fayum itself, they heard the same names that had been dinned into their ears at Memphis; the whole of the monuments were made to fit into a single cycle of popular history, and what they learned at one place completed, or seemed to complete, what they had learned at another.